Slavery
A slave in Teraell is property: owned outright and transferable by sale, gift, inheritance, or seizure, in the same legal category as a Dorath or a house. Not a person with reduced rights, not a servant under a hard contract, not a citizen of a lower order.
The two marks
Every route into slavery ends in the same two things. The Sigring is the collar, worn at the throat and never removed, bearing the owner's Oathbond sigil; it says who she belongs to for anyone who looks. The Koeler is the mark, a broken circle tattooed at the nape, where the collar sits and where no free person wears anything; it cannot be removed, which is its point. On manumission the circle is completed rather than struck out, so a freed person carries a closed circle for life.
Status is singular and portable
Under the Pact of Reason status crosses every border unchanged. A broken circle makes a person a slave in all six city-states. A completed circle marks them free in all six — and does not make them safe, because the completion can be dissolved, and a person claimed on the Frontier is a slave from that moment in every city, including the one that freed them. See Fyndrecht.
What a slave owns
Nothing, formally. Everything she has is her owner's, including what she is wearing, which is what the Wyndreis establishes on the first day. In practice most slaves have things — a box, a garment, a keepsake, a small hoard of coin nobody has asked about — and in a decent household nobody raises the question. In a bad one it can be taken at any moment, and both parties understand that this is what makes it a gift rather than a possession. A slave who is sold takes what her new owner permits, usually little.
What a slave cannot do
She holds no Oathbond — not a reduced one, not a personal aspect kept in reserve. She has no house that answers for her, no work that places her, no city whose law she holds, and no standard of her own to keep faith with, because the decisions that would test it are not hers. What she does attaches to her owner; her conduct is his conduct and everyone reads it that way, which is why a household's slaves are watched as closely as its members.
She cannot give an aeslae: the three answers went with the three aspects, and asking a slave for one is either a courtesy from someone who has forgotten or a cruelty from someone who has not. She cannot own property, enter contracts, bring a case, testify in most matters, marry, or refuse a sale.
What a slave can do
A great deal, and it varies entirely by household: manage a house, keep accounts, run a workshop, raise children, handle money, travel alone on errands, direct the work of other slaves. A skilled slave in a Forgegate workshop may be the best hand in the room and everyone knows it; a household slave in Shining Reach may run the entire domestic economy of a senator's townhouse. What she cannot do is hold authority over a free person — a slave telling a free workman what to do is carrying her owner's instruction, and everyone in the room knows it, including her. None of it is a right. All of it is permitted, revocable, and dependent on an owner's judgment.